Implantable medical devices (IMDs) have been used for monitoring patient health condition or disease states and delivering therapies. For example, implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) can be used to monitor for certain abnormal heart rhythms and to deliver electrical energy to the heart to correct the abnormal rhythms. Some IMDs can be used to monitor for chronic worsening of cardiac hemodynamic performance, such as due to congestive heart failure (CHF), and to provide cardiac stimulation therapies, including cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) to correct cardiac dyssynchrony within a ventricle or between ventricles.
The IMDs can be programmed to store measured physiologic data in a memory. These physiologic data can be retrieved and presented to a system user such as a clinician in a display device. The system user can review the stored physiologic data to determine the presence or causes of a physiologic event, or to determine whether a device therapy results in desired therapeutic outcome.
Some IMDs are able to detect cardiac arrhythmias, such as atrial fibrillation (AF). AF is the most common clinical arrhythmia affecting millions of people. During AF, disorganized electrical pulses originated from regions in or near an atrium can lead to irregular conductions to ventricles, thereby causing inappropriately fast and irregular heart rate. AF can be paroxysmal that may last from minutes to days before it stops by itself, persistent that may last for over a week and typically requires medication or other treatment to revert to normal sinus rhythm, or permanent where a normal heart rhythm cannot be restored with treatment. Timely detection of AF, and storing electrograms and other physiologic information associated with the AF, can be clinically important for assessing progression of AF.